May 2019 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Who, The WHO, Cavemen, Child Labor, and We Won’t Get Fooled Again

Every Saturday we’d grab some fish and chips, head to the park, watch The Who. – The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret.

The motto of the World Health Organization – “There is no health problem so small that we cannot dedicate millions in government dollars on salaries so that we can look it up on the Internet, hold conferences on it in international vacation spots on the government dime, and also hang out in our palatial Geneva, Switzerland headquarters while eating non-GMO, free-range, gluten-free snacks that we also paid for with government dollars.”

In a bid to make sure that journalists have something to write about, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced this week that it had three new findings:

“Burnout” is a psychological condition of international importance,
“Gaming Disorder” is a psychological condition of international importance, and
They need some fancy new chairs for their office in Geneva, Switzerland, because sitting in chairs for grueling six hour days surfing the Internet are just heck on their spines. A masseuse and some spa time would be nice, too.

This new categorization goes into effect on January 1, 2022, and until then apparently you can’t have these conditions until then, so feel free to be burned out and while playing Pokémon nonstop until you pass out from lack of sleep all you want. But how does the WHO define these new menacing maladies that are the greatest threat to the world?

I imagine the view of Lake Geneva is to die for from the roof! Ha, to die for! That’s a health joke. (Photo by: Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, snarky caption by yours truly.)

Burnout:

Burnout is an “occupational phenomenon”, which means that you can’t catch it from an AntiFa® member, because they’re allergic to actual jobs. Burnout is defined as:

Energy depletion or exhaustion,
A greater mental distance from one’s job, and
Reduced professional efficacy.

This describes every single employee at the local McDonalds in Modern Mayberry, so I guess WHO is right, this is an epidemic that we need an international agency focused on. I would say that I hope they don’t work too hard at it and risk burnout themselves, but then I recalled they work for the WHO, so I can rest easily tonight.

Honestly, that picture is the one I’d like to have taken of me in the last moment before I died – go out like a man. But in reality, I bet that today that guy is an unfrozen caveman lawyer who has to get his billing hours up or the other partners would come into his cave at night and mash him up with big rocks. For reals? If this was the last moment of my life? I would die a happy man.

I’m betting that this “burnout” isn’t a new phenomenon. I’m certain that our distant ancestors just couldn’t get themselves out of the cave some mornings because Oog, their supervisor, was going to get on them again for not holding the atlatl in just the right way to bring down the mammoth.

Stupid Oog. And I bet that Oog will tear me a new one on my performance review – maybe I should talk to HR – Hominid Relations.

Okay, so burnout is probably a product of today’s society, since at almost every point in history up until now, being “burned out” would have resulted in starvation. Perhaps all the employees need is proper motivation?

Also 1872: “I’m sorry to hear that you’re burned out. Allow me to show my condolences after I’m done with my fiftieth straight 12 hour shift at the mill.”

Gaming Disorder:

Gaming disorder is defined by the WHO as:

Inability to stop playing a game even if it interferes with relationships, work, and sleep, and
Lasts for a year.

I thought that the above bullet points were the goal of a good video game? I mean, the ultimate video game would have people divorced and starving to death on their couch because they couldn’t stop playing.

This isn’t a video game, but it is one of the funniest clips in the last 15 years.

I’ll admit that I’ve given video gaming a hard time in previous posts, but I’ll also admit that I’ve been the guilty party from time to time. I have a weakness for strategy games, and growing up there wasn’t anyone else interested, so I didn’t have anyone to play the games with. There are few enough that have sufficient complexity to be interesting. But when I find one . . . oops, it’s three A.M., where did the time go?

Also: Why a year? Seems random, just like every recipe says “bake at 350°F (771°C) for two hours.” Are you sure it isn’t 375°F (-40°C) for ninety minutes (400 metric minutes)? I think when your personal hygiene suffers to the point that your dead corpse would repel a starving hyena, you’ve probably hit any reasonable definition of being just a little too obsessed with Grand Theft Auto®. But WHO says a year . . . so I guess I’ve got 345 days left. The power company won’t care, right?

Now I won’t say that there isn’t a role for WHO. It might serve a useful purpose if it stuck to actual medical issues that are important. WHO helped eradicate smallpox, and that alone is worthy of actual admiration. And there are numerous missions that it works on today that are important:

HIV/AIDS,
Malaria,
Tuberculosis,
And the big granddaddy of all:

For a summary of how scary Ebola is, check out Aesop’s posts over at Raconteur Report – they’re chilling and make most horror movies look like a best case scenario. Here’s a link to his take: (LINK). If you’re not already, you should be reading him, daily – Aesop is an unrelenting voice for truth, and that’s a rare and dangerous thing. Everyone in Fort Wayne – you should read Aesop.

WHO really does have an important mission outside of these silly conditions that it makes up to get the monotone talkers from NPR® all atwitter. But how serious are they about spending governmental dollars for health?

Not very. Their offices are in Geneva, Switzerland. Geneva (from the pictures I’ve seen) is absolutely stunning. I’d move there in a heartbeat for the scenery and also because local residents vote to see if you can stay. Not “you” as a class of people, but you as an individual. If you’re a jerk? You’ll be kicked out of the pool. And when Muslims demanded that the Swiss remove the cross from their flag? The Muslims were told to pound sand. Oops? Can I say “pound sand” when referring to a Muslim, or is that soil discrimination? I mean, we all know that Europe wouldn’t exist without non-Europeans, right?

Regardless of soil classification, I like the moxie of the Swiss. But the average rent in Geneva is $3000 a month for a two bedroom apartment that probably is smaller than the backseat of the Kia® Soul™ where Miley Cyrus lost her virginity to Joe Biden. If the WHO were (Great Britain) was (United States) serious, they’d move their headquarters to someplace like Detroit where the town is giving away property. I imagine that WHO hasn’t moved because skiing sucks in Michigan when you compare it to Gstaad. I’d post the obligatory picture of the urban wasteland that Detroit is, but, you have Google® too.

But burnout? Video games? These are not problems that require international attention or an organization of pampered international bureaucrats.

A threat we need an international organization to respond to: dangerous asteroids.
A threat we don’t need an international organization to respond to:

Butts don’t kill planetary life, it’s space rocks moving at an average of 17 km/s (3 mph) that are faster than your mother in junior high that will kill you. Okay, your mother may kill you, but the space rocks will depopulate Australia, if that continent even exists. I’m thinking Australia is something that map makers drew in because they were bored and wanted to prove to chicks that they were hip, or cool, or fly, or lit. Depends on what they said in on August 22, 1770.

Yo.

The WHO is like every other government agency. Over time they forget their primary mission because they’ve either achieved it (Centers for Disease Control), or it’s too hard (NASA) so they end up with scary stories about cookie dough (The CDC, Raw Cookie Dough, and Sexy Theocracy) or create braille books on eclipses (Elon Musk: The Man Who Sold Mars). Aesop over at Raconteur Report brought up the military in this context with a post that’s the best I’ve read all week. He’s right. (LINK)

Why does the WHO behave this way? Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy seems to still be in full force.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers’ union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

When a cell behaves like the WHO and most other government agencies do, it’s called cancer. I wonder why no government agency exists merely to keep the other agencies working on what they’re supposed to work on?

I guess that’s just a mystery no one can solve. Unless we put Roger Daltrey on the case!

Real aside: when I finally listened to Won’t Get Fooled Again – I think I was 20 or so, I realized that The Who was on the side of freedom. I wish the other WHO would just . . . do their job.

Financial Advisers, Future Predictions, and Three-Breasted Mars Women

“Baldrick, I have a very, very, very cunning plan.” – Blackadder

I wonder if she inspired the military-industrial complex speech?

Financial advisers have a pretty standard set of advice:

Get a job. Opening your own business is risky, so it’s best if you work for someone else.
Max out contributions to your 401k. Put your money in stock index funds.
Work forty (or more) hours per year for forty (or more) years, depending on how much you lost in the divorce settlement(s).
When you are of no further use to the corporation* anymore financially ready, retire. Fortunately, by the time you retire you’ll be so exhausted from all of the hours working that you’ll (ideally) just sit on your porch in a daze staring off and wondering where your life went and why Bob Barker isn’t hosting the Price is Right® anymore.
If you’re lucky, your kids will put you into a retirement home that doesn’t require that you manufacture basketball shoes for Nike® on a quota in exchange for individually wrappedhard candies.

That’s pretty much what a financial advisor will tell you, if you strip out the cynicism. But why would you strip out the cynicism? That would take all the fun out of it – we ain’t getting out of here alive, so might as well smile on the way, like Socrates did after his trial. “I drank what???”

The problem with financial advisors, however, is that they give great advice based on what worked in the past. Any weather forecaster can tell you that the best possible weather forecast is that “tomorrow will be just like today,” since it’s 85% certain that’s going to be correct, or at least my statistics professor in college said so. The past really does predict the future pretty well.

Except when it doesn’t.

The thing the past doesn’t predict well is tornados, hurricanes, floods, volcanos and pollen. I strongly support just calling them all torhurflovolpols just so I can see television broadcasters talking about the Torhurflovolpol index. “Well, Brian, there’s a 45% chance of something on the Torhurflovolpol index. So get out your floating waterproof asbestos crash armor with built in respirator.” I think they sell those at Eddie Bauer®.

It is certain, however, that we will be really surprised by the events that lead to the future world we’ll be living in 30 years from now. Let’s jump back into the time machine and go thirty years in the past and look at some of the ludicrous predictions that would have been laughed at, but were nevertheless correct.

In 1989, if I told you that:

The Soviet Union would collapse in two years,
Donald Trump would be president,
China would be transformed from a communist totalitarian basketcase to an economic powerhouse and growing military power,
The United States would produce more oil per day in 2019 than the previous peak in output in 1973 and OPEC would be irrelevant,
People would willingly give all of their personal details to large corporations,
Music and long distance phone calls would be essentially free,
People would pay hundreds of dollars for “in-game” purchases on video games that seem more like a job than a game,
Keith Richards would still be alive with his original liver,
You could watch nearly any movie ever made, at any time, from nearly anywhere, and
People in Britain would be called fascist for rejecting rule by Germany.

If you have a really long term question, just ask yourself, What Would Keith Richards Do?

You would have laughed if I would have predicted those things, or called me a dreamer, insane, or just shook your head. The general consensus was all of the “predictions” above were absurdly unrealistic. The Soviets, for instance, looked nearly invincible. We were worried that they were masters of technology, producing better Olympians®, military tech, and Robotic Opponent Overlord Movie Boxing Antagonists (ROOMBA). From the outside, especially listening to certain journalists, people were worried that communism would be the ism that finally took down the country, although they looked a bit too happy when describing our glorious communist future.

The Soviets looked invulnerable, until it was obvious that they were so pathetic that they couldn’t even field a decent hair metal band.

Dolph Lundgren, the actor who played Drago in the Rocky movies has a master’s degree in Chemical Engineering, which means that he’s way more qualified in science than Bill Nye® and could also break Nye like a twig. I would pay $200 to see a boxing match between the two of them.

But these improbable things did happen.

This allows me to state, categorically, that the future we will have in 30 years isn’t the one you’re expecting. It will surprise you in ways that you can’t even imagine now. In hindsight, we all make up excuses in our minds to explain that we anticipated even the unanticipated. After the Soviet Union fell, all of the broadcasters and talking heads on television made the point that, unlike other people, they were the ones that had really seen this coming. “It was obvious to me, Brian, that the Soviet empire was just a house of cards.”

We can guess about the future in broad brush strokes, but the general wisdom just over a decade ago was that oil was going to be gone and that we’d be close to pumping dry holes right now and wearing football shoulder pads and studded leather jockstraps and living in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, sort of like walking into a Sears® or JCPenny’s™ in 2018. This explains G.W. Bush’s energy policy, and, let’s be real, probably the invasion of Iraq. Of major trends to miss, underestimating the amount of energy available for society was a doozy, even though he had the CIA, NSA, and every military intelligence agency working on that question.

And, I’ll admit, I never saw the amazing increase in oil production as a thing that could happen, either. My best excuse for not getting it right even though I thought about it quite a bit was that I didn’t have a billion dollar budget and dozens of flunkies to do research on it, though I bet they would have just done a lot of internet searches on studded leather jockstraps.

But Qwest® had a pretty accurate vision of the future. Qwest© was a communications company before it got bought out, but it had this commercial which means the future it predicted outlasted the company itself. Guess Qwest™ didn’t have a crystal ball that could predict everything . . .

We can look to the past and paint in broad brush strokes some things that are more probable than others. One thing that got me was a rainy Saturday re-watching of Total Recall, the 80’s Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. One of the things I was surprised by was the amount of technology they got absolutely right, from big screen flat televisions to communications to real-time airport weapon detection. In many ways, the “gee-whiz” feel of the original movie was just gone. Technology had made the miraculous (back then) “so what” today. And, again, this is the span of only thirty years. We still don’t either a Mars colony or three-breasted women, but I hear Elon Musk is working on both.

Duh. Three boobs exist only on Mars, silly.

Just like the collapse of the Soviet Union, unexpected things will happen. Huge things. And, if my guesses are right, the weather is ripe for big change in the next decade. The changes, thankfully, will be good, bad, or just plain amusing.

So where does that leave you and I? General Dwight D. Eisenhower said: “In preparing for battle, I have always found the plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” As a direct descendent of one of his teachers (this is actually true and not made up), I always wonder if Great-Grandma Von Wilder might have said that to a very young Eisenhower first, and then Ike re-used it after planning D-Day when it was actually Great-Grandma Von Wilder who did the heavy lifting on the logistics after he pulled her out of retirement and into a tent in London.

But if I’m right, the next twenty years will be the most momentous in human history, even more than when the police chased O.J. Simpson in his white Ford® Bronco™. I’m not sure if having a 401K or a 5.56mm is the number/letter combination that will be the most useful in a decade. I’m willing to bet that living far away from large urban population centers is wise, even if we end up living in the world with the best possible outcome. But I do know that planning is important, even if your plans are wrong. Hint: They will be.

Okay, I know someone is going to get this joke.

When you plan, you expand your mind, you think about future possibilities that you’ve never considered. A mind not stuck on business as normal is crucial. Yesterday’s weather be a good predictor of today’s weather, but it won’t predict volcanos very well. The future is unknown. The future will surprise you. If you’ve prepared for the volcano, the tornado isn’t the same threat, but you’ll be ready to adapt. Assuming you have your floating waterproof asbestos crash armor with built in respirator. I think they sell that at Wal-Mart®.

When it comes to being prepared for the future, remember this: It’s better to look silly having prepared for a disaster that never comes, than not having prepared for the disaster and having to explain to your children why you didn’t.

Bet you never hear that from a financial adviser.

*For the record, my view of corporations is that they’re a tool, a convenient legal fiction to allow Very Large Things to get done. The very name “corporation” comes from the Latin root word “corpus” which means a “place to have spring break”, or a “body” – corpus is also where the word corpse comes from. Regardless of the definition, either of those can get you put into jail. However, “incorporation” means, “giving a body to.” A corporation is legally a person.

And, just like people, some are naughty, even if they once had as their motto, “Don’t be evil.” I guess being evil pays pretty well.

I am not a financial adviser, paid or otherwise, so there’s that. But I have seen Better Call Saul™, and that’s at least some sort of qualification.

Memorial Day, 2019

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall-Hu Totya via Wikimedia, [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

One of the things I love most about writing this blog is finding out when I’m wrong. Yes, I know that’s a well with no bottom, but I’ll describe it thusly: The Boy and I were sitting out in the hot tub tonight talking. He brought up how angry he was that there had to be a Federal law passed to prevent discrimination against Vietnam veterans.

We don’t live in a “safe” house. Any opinion is open for challenge. Any opinion.

“Do you want to know what I think about that?”

He paused. He wasn’t looking for the “right” answer. That’s a recipe for being intellectually and emotionally gutted and left to dry in our house. “I guess so.”

“Why do you hesitate?”

“Well, now I know that after we discuss it, I’m going to look at all of it through different eyes. You’ll bring a perspective to it that I hadn’t thought about.” I could see on his face that he both liked and hated it. It was like an itch. It sucks being itchy, but it feels so good when you scratch, unless you’re like my Uncle Harold and are itchy because the Moon Men were talking to him through the television. Again.

I’m not sure I messed with The Boy’s mind too much during this particular conversation. We had a discussion that the Vietnam War certainly wasn’t lost by the military. I described the Tet Offensive to The Boy. During the Tet Offensive an all-out assault was launched in multiple locations in South Vietnam against both American and South Vietnamese targets. The Tet Offensive was a military disaster for the enemy (Viet Cong and NVA) as they were soundly defeated by a factor of at least ten to one and failed to achieve any useful military objective.

Back during the Vietnam War, the only real sources of information were: word of mouth, the local paper and the television news – websites with unapproved thoughts simply didn’t exist. Leftist propaganda on the Tet Offensive and was poured into the minds of the American public by a willfully complicit media, led by Walter Cronkite. I’d call him a Leftist prostitute, but they didn’t have to pay him extra. Let’s just call him, “easy,” since apparently he’d do his duty for the Left for a coke and a burger.

What Walter said just wasn’t so, but there was no voice to contradict him. That being said, this post isn’t a defense of the Vietnam War as an appropriate policy, and it isn’t attacking it, either – I’m not opening that particular bag of angry housecats tonight, and it’s not important for the point of this post.

Rather, tonight’s post is an example of just that conversation that I had with The Boy – I started writing on a completely different topic, and, after research, decided I was either wrong or more research would be necessary to make sure I was right. Maybe that topic will show up as a future post, but it won’t be today. Too many inconvenient facts that have (once again) made me rethink what I was going to say.

The world is funny that way – facts don’t always match preconceived notions. Honestly, that’s one of the joys of writing this blog – finding out things that I think, that just aren’t so, and finding out more about the way the world really works.

Back in the day, The Mrs. did the news on a radio network, she wrote her own copy, and selected stories, and put it all together for broadcast at the top and bottom of every hour. Even though we lived in a state where basketball was popular, The Mrs. didn’t cover it on the news – at all. She covered football and hockey, but never ran news about basketball. This was on a radio network, listened to by (probably) hundreds of thousands of people, daily.

Subtle? Certainly. Probably nobody noticed that there were no basketball scores on the radio – heck, if they were basketball fans they probably knew the scores already. But it impacted me – someone controls what stories made the radio news. Therefore, someone controls the stories that make the national news.

Did The Mrs. have a political agenda? Not really. Did Walter Cronkite? Certainly. If there was any doubt, his later quotes (you can look them up) showed him to be firmly on the Left, and firmly in the camp of a one-world government.

When you watch the news, ask yourself two questions about every story: “Why are they showing me this now?” and, “What are they not telling me?”

It was intentional that I brought up Tet on Memorial Day weekend when talking with The Boy. I had an agenda. He needs to know the sacrifices that were made by our troops and others, and to know, certainly, that there are forces that actively oppose freedom. Thankfully, there have been plenty of brave men who fought on the side of freedom.

But far too many died. This our day to remember them.

Arete, Excellence, and Clowns Gone Bad

â€œAim small, miss small.â€ â€“ The Patriot

â€œOwning a nuclear weapon means never having to say youâ€™re sorry.â€ â€“ John Wilders Book of Quotes:Â Cannibal Soup for the Soulâ„¢Â For reals, Iâ€™m thinking about publishing a book of collected essays from this blog, and thatâ€™s the title I want to use, and thus the â„¢.Â Itâ€™s MINE!

One of my professors at college had very, very precise printed block letters.Â One day we were talking and he brought it up, especially since my own writing was, shall we say, a challenge to read.Â I think I was his Teaching Assistant at that point in graduate school

My professor:Â â€œOne day, I was in my forties, I just decided that every single letter that I wrote was going to be perfect.Â Absolutely perfect.Â So, from that moment, no matter how slowly I had to write, I was going to be the best.Â I took a month and just focused on printing my letters perfectly every day.Â After a month, it was habit.â€

Being 20, I missed the significance of this, and only on reflecting now do I realize what my professor was really saying:

â€œWilder, you may have written something great.Â You may have written something awful.Â I just canâ€™t read it.â€

How bad was my hand writing? Â When I was in sixth grade, my teacher required every essay or book report to be in cursive so we could practice our handwriting at the same time we produced a book report.Â My teacher pulled me aside.Â â€œJohn, please print your essays.â€Â She had come to the (correct) conclusion that my handwriting was less decipherable than cuneiform texts, and that her only hope of ever grading one of them was for me to print it or for her to go back to graduate school and learn the ancient secrets of my people:Â Those Who Have Crappy Handwriting.

She let me just print my essays and book reports.

It was a big deal to me and I felt free after that.Â I hated cursive.Â I even remember the book that I was doing the report on:Â Farmer in the Sky, by Robert A. Heinlein.Â My teacher had no idea what the book was about, and actually had me read the report to her twice so that she was certain that I wasnâ€™t making it all up on the spot.Â The skill of reading my own handwriting helped me:Â if I could read my own handwriting, I could read anything.

Printing?Â That totally worked for me.Â I actually do it to this day, but I prefer typing. Â Itâ€™s quicker, but printing simple block letters works.

This is, supposedly, a receipt from a slave sale back in ancient Babylon.Â Imagine having to write a receipt out in clay, make a copy, and then put it in an oven.Â The drive through at their McDonaldsÂ® must have been slooooooow.

In thinking back to my professorâ€™s writing self-improvement plan, I realize it wasnâ€™t random, it was a process.Â The first step was, by far, the most important:

Wilder Rule Of Excellence Number One:Â Raise Your Standards

If youâ€™re trying to write a perfect upper case E, a sloppy E or a tilty E just wonâ€™t do.Â And maybe your first E wonâ€™t be perfect, but I assure you it will be better than the E you wrote when you werenâ€™t concentrating on it.Â It isnâ€™t easy.Â Itâ€™s slow.Â Itâ€™s frustrating.Â But once youâ€™ve changed your standards internally, a crappy E is something you wonâ€™t tolerate.Â Youâ€™ll notice it and it will drive you nuts.Â Every E becomes a challenge in perfection.

When you change your standards, your standards change you.Â Iâ€™m sure someone else has said that before, since there have been roughly 105 billion people that have lived since 50,000 B.C., so if Iâ€™m one human in a million, there are 105,000 others just like me who have lived.Â Thankfully, we donâ€™t all live in the same city

But the whole â€œWhen you change your standards, your standards change youâ€ line? Â I came up with it myself.Â I wrote it as my own original thought and realize it might be my most profound thought today, even if Descartesâ„¢ or AristotleÂ® or Judge JudyÂ© said it first.Â Thankfully, Iâ€™m in luck, I had another original thought today:Â balsa wood would not make a good salad topping, either in chunks or shredded.Â Feel free to discuss.

Wilder Rule Of Excellence Number Two:Â There Are No Shortcuts

Okay, I know thatâ€™s not original.Â I recall a joke about a person who wanted enlightenment and inner peace.Â And they wanted it right now!

Some Random Dude told the Dalai Lama the following joke:Â â€œHow does a Buddhist like his pizza?â€

The Dalai Lama: â€œI donâ€™t know.â€

Random Dude:Â â€œOne with everything.â€

The Dalai Lama:Â â€œI donâ€™t get it.â€

The above is supposedly true.Â In my imagination the Dalai Lama responded with:Â â€œOkay, I know a better one.Â Two lesbian surveyors and a horse walk into a bar . . . .â€

Getting better at anything is hard work.Â It turns out that those who are the very best at, for instance, playing violin, practice more than people who arenâ€™t as good.Â Practice is absolutely necessary to creating excellence.Â But the practice that works best is the practice that happens when you are right at the edge of your abilities.Â Itâ€™s when youâ€™re practicing at that edge that this weird blend of focus and trance takes over.Â Iâ€™m sure that thereâ€™s a word for it, but in my mind itâ€™s this state where the sense of self disappears.Â Perhaps the best word would be transcendent â€“ when Iâ€™m there I lose track of time.Â I donâ€™t think about the practice of writing a perfect E.Â I am the practice of writing a perfect E.Â I am excellence.Â With an E.

The management guru Tom Peters! (he likes to put exclamation! points! behind! everything!) wrote a column that I read in 1999.Â Tom Peters! was travelling, and decided that Tom Peters! was going to start running.Â His column stuck with me.Â Tom Peters! noted, more or less, that he was a very slow runner, but there was absolutely nothing preventing him from practicing like a world-class runner.Â He could push himself to his limits.Â Tom Peters! didnâ€™t have to wait to train like a world-class runner.Â Tom Peters! could do it right this minute.

Like my professor, last month I decided Iâ€™d improve my writing.Â Sure, I can read it and the NSAÂ® canâ€™t, but I decided Iâ€™d give it a shot.Â I focused every day when putting my daily to-do list together to make each letter perfect, each E a combination of right angles, as straight as I could make it.Â Amazingly I got better.Â I also noticed this â€“ even when writing a simple to-do list, I could be transcendent. Â I could lose myself in a quest to be excellent.

I think, in part, our world today seeks to trivialize the search for excellence.Â The Greeks nailed this in what they called Arete.Â Catherynne M. Valente described it like this:

The word I love is Arete.Â Â It has a simple meaning, and a complicated meaning.Â The simple one is:Â excellence.Â But if that were all, weâ€™d just use Excellence and I wouldnâ€™t bring it up until we got to E.Â Arete means your own excellence.Â Your very own.Â A personal excellence that belongs to no one else, one that comes out of all the things that make you special and different . . . . It could be anything in the world . . . .Â Itâ€™s even harder to get that good at it, because nothing, not even being yourself, comes without practice.

Arete also has the additional meaning of living up to your potential, fulfilling your purpose.Â I think many things about the way society is organized today serve to sever us from Arete.Â Television and movies make you a character in someone elseâ€™s Arete.Â You replace the feeling of excellence from actual achievement with psychologically experiencing someone elseâ€™s Arete.Â Some video games are like that as well, though certainly many require a great degree of skill.

And, yes, the highest and best use of some people is to play video games.

But much of modern work today is built around processes and defined procedures.Â The idea isnâ€™t that you do work with Arete, the idea is that you do mediocre work consistently.Â And you can do that work with people who have an I.Q. of 85 or 90.

Replacing Arete with processes and procedures lowers liability and provides consistency.Â Itâ€™s why people go to McDonaldsâ„¢ – not many people think of it as their favorite food, but itâ€™s inexpensive, consistent in quality, and fast.

Honestly, Arete is why I write this blog.Â When a good theme hits and Iâ€™m writing, I cease being.Â I am the blog.Â I am living a transcendent moment.Â I am Arete.Â Â Modern life takes us from that with process-driven jobs.

I described this post to The Boy while we enjoyed the hot tub tonight.Â The best conversations happen in the hot tub.Â No phones, no television, just discussion.Â The Boy immediately brought up Fight Club.Â Fight Club might be my favorite movie, primarily because of the amazing amounts of TruthÂ© that pop up in it.Â The Boy reminded me of an early scene in the movie, where the protagonist had a job that sucked his soul, but he could make his own Arete by making the perfect home by buying the perfect furniture from Fight Club Ikea.Â The thing missing from our soul today is simple:Â we want to be excellent, but the structure of modern society is pulling us away from Arete.

Are we willing to trade in our Arete for the perfect furniture?Â Are we willing to trade in our Arete for a video game?

Canâ€™t you just smell the Arete coming from the cube farm?Â No, thatâ€™s the smell of coffee.Â And despair.

I donâ€™t know about you, but Iâ€™m not.Â And if you looked at my to-do list?Â Itâ€™s much better this month than last month.Â Excellence is something we can do every day.Â We can become transcendent in our tasks, no matter how lowly â€“ if your task in this minute is to clean the floormats of a funky French fraternityâ€™s ferret using your fingers, lose yourself in it.Â Do the best job you can possibly do.

This Wilder, Wealthy and Wise post is brought to you by the word Arete, the letter E, and the number e.Â (The number e thing is a math joke.)

The One Where I Talk About WWII Tanks, Red Dawn, Wealth Management and Steve Martin

“Well I’m gonna go then. And I don’t need any of this. I don’t need this stuff, and I don’t need you. I don’t need anything except this. And that’s it and that’s the only thing I need, is this. I don’t need this or this. Just this ashtray. And this paddle game, the ashtray and the paddle game and that’s all I need. And this remote control. The ashtray, the paddle game, and the remote control, and that’s all I need. And these matches. The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control and the paddle ball. And this lamp. The ashtray, this paddle game and the remote control and the lamp and that’s all I need. And that’s all I need too. I don’t need one other thing, not one – I need this. The paddle game, and the chair, and the remote control, and the matches, for sure. And this. And that’s all I need. The ashtray, the remote control, the paddle game, this magazine and the chair.” – The Jerk

On film, first movie. No pants. Which explains the blackmail letters I keep seeing.

There’s a common scene in movies where the hero, a has-been, out of shape bum in need of a shave and smelling like convenience-store cheese, cheap booze and a Kardashian who hasn’t showered in weeks wakes up. The surroundings are a mess. Generally, the place is a fleabag motel – one that doesn’t cater to respectable people, like those fancy folks that use actual hamburger in their Hamburger Helper©.

Our hero is always a guy, never a gal.

Generally, what happened to our hero to have dropped to such a low point is that he lost something, generally a woman, though sometimes a child, but always of great meaning. It’s generally his fault. And with the loss of that loved one, he lost the reason to care. Everything is going wrong with his life. To quote one of the best movies since Rome fell to the robot legions of Abraham Lincoln in 1932, Baseketball:

We should make the Losers wear Loser t-shirts after the Super Bowl®. Why? Branding.

Our hero, Joe Cooper, being interviewed after losing the national championship in his sport (due to his error) and when he goofed up trying to save the life of his friend:

“Today I lost the game and a dear friend and . . . I’m feeling pretty vulnerable right now. I don’t think I should be by myself. I need someone to talk to . . . .”

The announcer turns away from Joe and faces the camera:

“It certainly looks like it’s raining s**t on Joe Cooper. Back to you.”

It’s at this low point that something happens to remind the hero of who he was, and what he stood for. The hero then looks himself in the mirror and decides that from today onward, life is going to change and he’ll start using that topical cream, every day, just like the label says.

One montage later? Instead of drinking a six-pack, the hero now has six-pack abs, gleaming teeth, and a mane of hair that would make a sorority swoon. Assuming women still swoon in the current year, or that sororities are comprised of women. Or that women are anything more than a social construct.

I’ll attend my mandatory sensitivity training next week, but even in 2019, BOYS CANNOT GET PREGGERS. Anything pregnant with that must facial hair must be a Kardashian. I promise – no more Kardashian jokes this month.

The big difference is that there is something that makes an emotional impact on the hero, which brings him back from his fallen state. This something changes him, gives him a reason to live, makes him care. It also connects that hero to the audience, allowing the audience to share in the struggle and, through that sharing, care about the hero and vicariously share his inevitable come-from-behind victory.

Who could have seen that coming?

It’s the theme of most of my favorite movies. Unfortunately, it’s also the theme of our recent history in the United States, but we’ve yet to see the redemption part.

There was a time when the Right cared about the debt and actually talked, unironically, about balanced budgets. I recall the constant drumbeat during my youth that “government can’t spend too much” because we would default, interest rates would skyrocket, and the Evil Wizard Jimmy Carter would keep cutting our money in half through his magic +2 Inflation Spell. At some point, probably before I was born, I think Democrats and Republicans both agreed on that we couldn’t spend money like Joe Biden in a hair-plug factory.

Later, probably in a Nixon-related rant, the post-war truce between Right and Left split. Democrats decided they couldn’t spend enough on social programs, and Republicans decided they couldn’t spend enough on military stuff.

Yes, I’m going to Leftist Hell. Aisle seat, please.

I’ll argue that we got a better deal with the military stuff, which resulted in Russia replacing the U.S.S.R. Russia on it’s surliest (feeling bloated and all) day isn’t ready to unleash nuclear Armageddon on Earth because Karl Marx convinced a bunch of barely literate people in the midst of a vodka-binge that killing the Czar was a cool idea. Sure, Russia is a state that barely visits this fine blog. And some of the freedoms might be lacking, like freedom of speech. But Russia has nothing fundamental against our way of life – they’d love to emulate it, but with 100% fewer hipsters. In my opinion, very penny spent on the military from 1948 to 1992 was worth it. I don’t miss the constant threat of nuclear annihilation.

Sadly, all we got from the Leftist social programs that were set up to eliminate poverty was more poverty. It would have been cheaper to just give everyone in poverty a million dollars back in 1965 when Johnson declared the War on Poverty©. At least then we’d be done with feeling guilty about it. “You’re poor? Sorry. Paid that bill. Shoo.” The best way (really) to eliminate poverty is to increase consequences and allow lower taxation on rewards. Make it so Playbox® and X-Station© don’t replace working for food.

Eliminating unlimited pools of foreign labor couldn’t hurt, either. But that’s another post.

Not my original, but it illustrates the point well.

Not to say that military spending hasn’t been silly from time to time. I’m absolutely certain that we have the finest equipment ready to turn back the Wehrmacht if Hitler’s ghost ever assumes control and decides he wants to invade San Diego. I guess I’m saying that our military, from a strategic standpoint, might be ready for those new bands, the Beatles© and Elvis™.

Why did we spend so much on the military? The norm throughout history in every nation in every war was to provide soldiers with the absolute minimum that they needed to get the job done. Kipling wrote about this a century ago in the poem Tommy, which has nothing at all to do with pinball:

You talk o’ better food for us, an’ schools, an’ fires, an’ all . . .

It’s nearly certain the same from the time the Roman legions marched on Carthage (Roman Virtues and Western Civilization, Complete with Monty Python) to the today, every soldier has been given only was absolutely necessary, and that was mostly grudgingly provided. “Really, armor on your vehicles? What, do you think we’re made of money? Rub some dirt on it, you big babies.”

So where does all the military money go? Well, there was once a joke that the armed forces had developed an absolutely invincible weapon system: it had parts manufactured in every single congressional district. That’s where the money goes. Into the pockets of likely voters.

People used to argue about government spending and how we could reduce it. In public! Now it’s different. No one cares about spending or debt at all. Social spending? Why not have Medicare™ for all? Pay for everyone’s student loans. While we do that, let’s also build huge floating targets aircraft carriers, the likes that the Japanese Soviets ISIS our future foes will fear. But, please, let’s not talk about Chinese missiles taking one to the bottom of the sea. Why, do you know where the components of an aircraft carrier are made? Why, everywhere from the Redwood Forests, to the New York Islands! This carrier was built for you and me.

Social programs are a vote-harvesting program. And so is the manufacture of aircraft carriers. But, again, should World War II break out again, we are so totally ready to win it. We’ve even modeled our procurement strategy after the Germans (remember, they lost) – small numbers of really technically advanced components. 6,000 Panthers (German) will beat 49,000 Sherman (American) and 64,000 T-34 (Russian) tanks any time, right?

Oops.

Guess not.

(Translation for the tank impaired: Germany produced, without question, the highest quality of tanks during World War II. But they didn’t have many of them. When the United States and the Soviets started making tanks, they massively outnumbered the technically superior German tanks. It’s like being nibbled to death by ducks. They might be small, but they will get you. I half imagine the Air Force© would like to produce just one perfect fighter plane. Just one at the cost of a trillion dollars. But it would be so perfect, and never mind that the enemy produced 150,000 fighters at two million dollars each.)

The point, however, isn’t about tank production strategy, even though you can buy a working – with functional gun! – T-34 for about $80,000. No, the point is about the indisputable fact that no one in Washington cares even a little bit about how much money we spend every year, or if the troops live or die, or if anyone ever stops being poor. And why should they? It appears that right now we can spend as much as we want, consequence free. That’s bound to continue forever? And how would I explain to The Mrs. that she needs to brush up on her college Russian for the manuals for the T-34 I just bought?

Do you think The Mrs. might buy the argument that I bought a Russian tank because of my principles? Do you think James at the Bison Prepper (LINK) might think I was frugal because, really, what could be more prepper than a tank? And, for the record, it’s not a new tank. Totally used. No FLIR or anything.

I suppose I could use it for hunting?

I’m not sure what broke us as a nation, what make us that slovenly, unkempt guy with a three-day growth of beard smelling of cheap gin, Johnny Depp, and just as sticky as a movie theater floor. But just like Steven Segal’s® belly, we as a nation seem to have lost our discipline. Honestly, I’m tempted to buy that T-34 just so I can imitate our government and waste the money, though, honestly, nobody’s making T-34’s anymore. I’d really love to buy a Panther, but there are only 29 (as far as the Internet knows) of them still in existence.

Hmm.

There is a bright side to this: the Federal Reserve© has discovered it can print money forever, and can guarantee that you will receive your promised Social Security benefits. The Federal Reserve™ won’t, however, guarantee that you’ll be able to buy a single piece of PEZ™ with your monthly check let alone a Panther or a T-34.

The future will bring bailouts. Why? Spending. Duh.

The funny thing is that this will really be a stable system. Until it’s not.

Will that be the moment that makes the hero recognize who he is, and what he’s given up? And, most importantly, will he have a tank?

T-34 pic from: Antonov14 [CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)]

In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!

I see dead people. – The Sixth Sense

It really will be different this time, right?

The biggest famine in human history was caused by communism, based on a bad idea and a stubborn decision to hold with ideology over reality. It was known as, ironically, The Great Leap Forward. Mao decided in 1957 that within 15 years, China could surpass the United Kingdom (The Guys Who Supply Evil Accents to Movies) in economic production. Mao was egged on to make this pronouncement based on Nikita Khrushchev’s 1957 pronouncement that in fifteen years that the U.S.S.R. would surpass the United States in economic production.

Spoiler alert – none of these things happened, and Bruce Willis was the ghost the whole time.

That’s the entire world death rate. Who says communism isn’t powerful!

The Great Leap Forward killed about 45 million people in China. Mao decided that he wanted to collectivize farming to consolidate power (more on this later). In addition to this, Mao also decided that to increase economic output, he’d have the peasants make steel. In their backyards. This worked about as well with an I.Q. above room temperature could have predicted, especially once the farmers started melting down the tools they farmed with to meet production targets, thus decreasing food amounts even more than replacing experienced farmers with office workers did.

Oops.

Another victory for environmentalism under communism!

Farmers had to melt down steel farming tools to meet Mao’s steel production targets. Even though Mao was informed relatively early on that the policy wasn’t working, he stuck with it because he didn’t want to look weak because his wife told him he never would get that raise unless he stood up to his boss at work. In the end? 45 million people starved to death so Mao could keep his day job.

But this was just stupid, not vengeful. This is known in China today (as related by the Internet) as the “Three Years of Natural Disasters.” Even in death Mao cannot be challenged publically, so you can bet he finally got that raise. The rumor is that even his ghost can kill. But Mao’s ghost kills via bad breath, but George Washington’s ghost kills with laser eyes, so we’ve got that going for us.

Stalingrad? No, Stalinsad™. I may have to really trademark that for a series of teddy bears I sell to leftists so they can hug them after rallies.

Although Josef Stalin only gets the Silver Medal in the “Killed My Own People” sweepstakes, it’s not due to lack of trying – he managed to kill, by many estimates, 20 million of his own people in activities completely unrelated by war. How did we get there?

Soon after Lenin died, Stalin and the Soviet Union benefitted from a strong and robust economy. The local farmers, called Kulaks, were producing record grain yields. And if there’s one thing that people like, it’s grain, especially James at The Bison Prepper (LINK).

That’s a good thing, right? The grain production gave the U.S.S.R. a source of currency, and the Kulaks imported farm machinery to increase farm production even more. The Kulaks were the engine of the economy. As a leader, Stalin must have loved these guys, right?

No. Stalin hated them. They were a threat to his power, and he didn’t like any power structure existing outside of him. So, he went after the Kulaks.

But what was a Kulak? Well, a Kulak was a peasant. But this was a peasant that was slightly less poor than the other peasants. That meant, for reals, that this peasant had a slightly nicer hovel, and had some regular gruel. It wasn’t even as good a job as the assistant manager at McDonalds, but it was still really good in the Soviet Union where a bowl of warm mud was considered a major prize. As such, these Kulaks were often looked up to locally because they were successful. Their position in society was earned through merit.

But Stalin didn’t like Kulaks, and decided he was going to break them. One of the first things he did was to create an army because Stalin had declared a Revolution© against . . . his own people. This army was called the Twenty-Five-Thousanders. They were steel and factory workers that were armed, given a quickie six-month training program on farming, and told to go make collective farming work. Essentially they were dim-witted college interns with guns.

One of the interesting (to me, at least) measures of communism is how the system selects, on purpose, those of no real merit to be placed in positions of authority. The factory worker given a gun and told to enforce Stalin’s will was being given the best job they had ever had, and power beyond anything a typical factory worker ever had. This policy of promoting the unworthy and stupid into positions of power made the unworthy and stupid really zealous communists. Where else could they go to get that kind of power? They owed everything they were to the state. Where else could a former prostitute or pimp decide on the summary execution of a former doctor or engineer?

So, faced with the army of 25,000 idiots, the Kulaks decided to do what a reasonable person does: they decided to get together to go to Moscow to work out a solution. Stalin was glad to meet them, and worked with them on a solution to all of their problems: those Kulaks that weren’t summarily executed were shipped off to “leisure” camps in Siberia. You might have heard of the camps – they called them Gulags.

Ahh, just like Disneyland®!

But that wasn’t enough. Stalin sent his 25,000 strong army to confiscate every bit of grain from problem areas. Every bit. He encouraged the poorer peasants to raid the houses of the Kulaks and take . . . everything. Envy is powerful, and here was a license to steal.

So they stole. But that wasn’t enough.

Stalin essentially shut the border down of the Ukraine after pulling all food out of the area. In a stunningly familiar Communist plan, armed troops kept the people in. Mao was an inadvertent murderer, but Stalin starved millions of people to death, on purpose.

Why? James Mace explains:

I remain convinced that, for Stalin to have complete centralized power in his hands, he found it necessary to physically destroy the second-largest Soviet republic, meaning the annihilation of the Ukrainian peasantry, Ukrainian intelligentsia, Ukrainian language, and history as understood by the people; to do away with Ukraine and things Ukrainian as such. The calculation was very simple, very primitive: no people, therefore, no separate country, and thus no problem.

Even today, the Western Press has a love affair with Stalin. I won’t go into reasons why, and I’m not sure I care, but it’s obvious that the New York Times has never met a communist it didn’t love. Walter Duranty privately noted on a telegram to London that over 10 million had died of starvation in 1934 during the Holodomor, but wrote publicly rosy pictures about the Soviet Union. But what did Duranty say in public?

Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda. There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.

Showing that they are perfectly unbiased, the Pulitzer™ committee has refused to rescind the Pulitzer Prize® given to Duranty for his participation in the cover up of Stalin’s mass murder of millions. I wonder if complicity is in any dictionary they own?

At least someone got it right, but he didn’t win a Pulitzer©.

Rumor is that he was murdered by the Soviet NKVD. Because truth is the biggest enemy a dictator has.

It might occur to a discerning reader that, while Democracy Dies in Darkness™, tens of millions can be killed by communism and lying about it, even when proven, gets prestigious awards! And who says the press is biased.

But just like in the Olympics®, communists can be proud. The got the gold and the silver!

GBD 2017 Mortality Collaborators [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)] – Mortality graph.

Stop Making Yourself Unhappy, Unless It Involves Green Alien Women Doing Sexy Dances

“Bob, it won’t kill you. But it will make you very sore.” – Real Men

I promise, I try to have a point on alternate weeks.

The difference between what reality actually is and the way that you think reality should be can make you crazy. It’s not unusual – I think it’s the way we’re wired as humans. We have a big brain, and we can imagine things. I, for instance, can imagine a world in peace where people just leave me alone, taxes don’t exist, and Joseph Stalin and communism are as hated as Britney Spears and the IRS.

Yeah. I can imagine it. But I won’t hold my breath. Some of the stuff the world throws at me makes me pretty mad, if I allow myself to sit and think about it. You’ll notice I used the word “allow” – because that’s what it is – allowing myself to dwell on something that makes me mad. Honestly, I’ll admit it: sometimes I go online just to find a story that makes me angry, probably because it’s a substitute for a pacemaker that doesn’t require electricity. So, yes, anger keeps my heart beating on alternate Wednesdays when I run low on coffee.

The sad part is that most anger is a wasted emotion. Most of life just is. Nothing you can do can change it. On many things trying to change it is even worse than the original problem. We started out with a Depression in 1930, but ended up with a World War. See? Not a real good trade. Oh, wait, we got the space program out of it.

However, I’ll also tell you that you just can’t ignore everything in life and just say mañana, as attractive as that may sound at 5AM on a Monday morning. So, you can’t care about everything, but you also can’t ignore everything. It sounds like a paradox, like how the Kardashians became famous for being famous, but give me a second to explain. I’m a trained professional.

For me, it comes down to having a list of criteria.

Does it matter? In reality, most things really don’t matter one way or another. If they’re out of strawberry topping for your hamburger, it doesn’t matter. You might remember tomorrow, but you certainly won’t remember next week. You won’t remember when you’re 80. Rule of thumb? If you won’t remember it next year, it isn’t important.

Does your action make a difference? You may be a Flat-Earther© and believe that everyone on Earth should move away from the horribly illogical heliocentric model that has no evidence behind it. No matter what actions they take, they won’t make a difference. I mean, because they’re nuts.

Is it a matter of principle? Not everything is. Giordano Bruno (Jordan Brown in English) is a dead Italian who got burned at the stake due to heresy on February 17, 1600, at the age of 52-ish, so you know he pissed somebody with a cool hat off. The funny thing is that if you go to the Wikipedia page on Bruno, it makes him look like Carl Sagan crossed with Barack Obama. He questioned all Christian dogma (which makes him the darling of the Left) while arguing for an infinite Universe and used the Copernican model of our Solar System to predict that there would be planets around other stars. Genius!

But Wikipedia skips gently around the fact that he didn’t like Christ – he liked Hermes, and was a fan of reintroducing Egyptian gods. Today, he’s revered as a Gnostic saint. And, really, if anyone starts the name of their sect with a silent “G”, do we really want give them any gcredence? I thought gnot.

Even though Bruno picked a really stupid thing to die about, at least he had some pretty fierce words to say to people who thought they could tell him what to do:

It is immoral to hold an opinion in order to curry another’s favor; mercenary, servile, and against the dignity of human liberty to yield and submit; supremely stupid to believe as a matter of habit; irrational to decide according to the majority opinion, as if the number of sages exceeded the number of fools.

Jordan Brown, er, Giordano Bruno seems to think pretty highly of his own opinion. But the sentiment is a good one. One I’ll buy, unless it’s about running out of strawberry topping for my hamburger. That’s probably not a hill I’m willing to die on. Unless they were out of ketchup, too.

I bought Giordano’s book, Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, and started to read it. After I realized that it would take me two years of study of ancient Egyptian mythology, ancient Greek mythology, astrology, and 16^th Century European politics to decipher it, I decided to read a book where aliens wanted to drop a meteorite on Earth instead. At least I understood that the aliens wanted to come to earth because they liked our women as much as we do.

No, not hot alien girls. But, in a pinch that’ll do.

But Giordano has a point – there is a place where principle wins above all. It may not be this hill we’re willing to die on, but we have to be willing to die on some hill, even if we can’t win. If you’re not willing to die on that stupid hill where it’s a beautiful, pointless, stupid gesture? You’re not fully human, and would probably sell me out for a pack of Juicy Fruit® gum. For your sake, I hope you know where your hill is, or can find it. Even (shudder) if it involves astrology. Jesus, Bruno was an idiot.

The alternate view is that the future belongs to those that show up, so, pick that hill carefully. Giordano picked his. And he really did die on it. I’m pretty sure he didn’t have kids, but he did show up for the future, in the most potent way possible: with his ideas. If I could go back in time I wouldn’t kill Stalin or Lenin. Nope. I’d kill Marx – he was a fat guy who never had a job and was probably smelly because he couldn’t properly clean out his bodily crevices in Victorian England, but his ideas . . . his ideas have killed millions. But more about those tools on Monday.

By the way, finding a stupid name like Jordan Brown (sorry, dude) could sound so much like someone who commanded a tank division, I looked up John Wilder in Italian, and it would be Giovanni Feroce. Which is really badass. But it’s not Latin, which would probably sound something like Giovannius Maximus Feroci. Yeah. Like commander of a tank, designed by Ferrari® to fight grizzly bears. I can deal with that. Except Italians can’t seem to keep the oil on the inside of the engine.

The Boy put this together. He does indicate that he works for Ramen®. His favorite is beef, but he will do chicken. Shrimp? You’re not making any friends there. Stick with land animals.

Here are the zones:

Zone 1: This is the most important zone: you can change it. It matters. It’s a matter of principle. This, with no humor added, is the definition of the hill you can die on.

Yes, it’s a Microsoft® Office™ meme. No, I’m not proud about it.

Zone 2: You can change it. The best definition of this is “It’s the principle of the thing.” It’s not important. This is the Zone inhabited by Karens.

And my real readers would never complain.

Zone 3: It matters. It’s a matter of principle. But you can’t change it. I think this is what Twitter® accounts are for? Also? Maybe sometimes this is a good hill to die on, too.
Zone 4: It’s a matter of principle. And it doesn’t matter. And you can’t change it. I think this is the MySpace© of issues.
Zone 5: It matters, you can change it, but it’s not a matter of principle. So, you know, get up and mow your lawn. Or at least stay off mine.
Zone 6: It matters, you can’t change it. Ignore it. Triggered people live here, and I know you don’t want to live like Trigglypuff.

I remember when the word “triggered” had nothing to do with people unable to contain emotions just because someone said something naughty. But I also remember when dudes didn’t win girl’s high school track meets.

Zone 7: You can change it. It’s not principle. It doesn’t matter. This sounds a lot like FaceBook®. If you use it, keep in mind you’re keeping Zuckerberg in sippy cups while he sits on his high chair.

Thankfully Congress got him a sippy cup.

Inadvertently, I seem to have come up with actual advice that might help you if you’re sane enough to follow it. Who knew? Nah, who am I kidding? Go nuts. Literally. It seems to work for AntiFa®.

Avenger of Thrones Season 8, Infinity Gauntlet Episode: Shakespeare and Debt

“A Lannister always pays his debts.” – Game of Thrones

Okay, one of the aristocratic families on Game of Thrones™ is the Stark family, so it’s only logical that Tony Stark™ get the Iron Throne©, being Ironman® and all.

In Hamlet©, in the scene before Rosencrantz and Guildenstern assemble the Infinity Gauntlet and destroy King’s Landing, Shakespeare wrote: “neither a borrower, nor a lender be.” Several of his plays referenced debt, including The Merchant of Venice. I may not have perfect recollection, but I don’t recall Shakespeare mentioning debt in a positive light, except when he was trying to borrow money for a $83,000 pickup with heated seats.

Debt, at its core, is borrowing from the future to fund today. We do that with life all of the time – I’ll have the extra brownies, so I’ll exercise tomorrow. I’ll stay up late to binge-watch Avenger of Thrones®: Trans-Robot Skywalker™ and then grab some extra sleep tomorrow. But when we talk about debt, we mainly mean money and thankfully not my soul. That’s been repossessed like six times already.

Debt is very personal. I remember $20 in a concert I owe to a guy from when I was in college, and I wish I knew where he was so I could repay him – the reciprocal concert I bought tickets for was cancelled. I also remember $20 that a guy owes me from 2015. I ended a friendship because a guy said he returned the $75 I lent him under my front door mat, but I didn’t have a front door mat. That wasn’t about the debt, more about the lies. But you get the picture. Debt is personal.

In addition to being personal, the way that people react to debt is also emotional. I’m pretty sure no person ever decided that having $78,231 in student loans was something to brag about – if anything, people who have borrowed a lot of money are often plagued with feelings of embarrassment, as if they’d been caught making out with Chelsea Clinton. Sure, it’s legal, but, ewww.

I’m sure her husband married her for love.

Recently, records found from 1600 or so show that Shakespeare’s father, John (!) Shakespeare, had tons for problems with debt. I think these were his credit card receipts. The problems that John had happened while William was still young and living at home, so it’s likely Pop Shakespeare had to borrow money for Bill’s prom tuxedo. The good news was that the standard for a corsage in 1582 was a turnip on a string of twine stapled with wooden pegs to the date’s forehead, so, that didn’t set John back too far.

Thanks (in part) to Shakespeare, the most basic advice about borrowing money is this:

Don’t borrow money unless you absolutely have to. Debt may be a necessary evil, but like Canada and their sensuous, flirty doughnuts, it’s still evil.
Most people who lend you money aren’t like my dad, Pop Wilder. Pop had been at a small-town farm bank and had worked with the same families for decades. He had an interest in seeing them thrive. Nowadays? Those banks are mainly owned by FirstBank Of Chase Fargo® with an Internet server hosted in Beijing. Most people who lend money see you like Oprah© sees a cheeseburger with extra bacon: as an opportunity.
Paying back money you borrowed hurts. Adding interest on top makes it worse. Adding “Knuckles” the enforcer as a mechanism to make you pay? That makes it even more painful.
Loans haunt you like a ghost and poison your hope for a peaceful future. Maybe loans are even worse than a ghost, because I’m sure loans are real. Robert Heinlein said, “Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: pay cash or do without. Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats up domestic felicity.” Debt hangs over you like the smell of the armpit of a thirteen-year-old who hasn’t discovered deodorant.
You come to resent the people who you have obligated yourself to. If you really want to hate someone, borrow money from them. It’s like a screechy ex-wife on steroids, but it haunts your dreams. Like a screechy ex-wife.

The dog cost a lot more money, and just shot anyone who came up the road.

That last point deserves a bit more discussion. I had a friend come to me wanting to borrow some money. There was, I kid you not, a PowerPoint® presentation that they put together explaining the need for the money and the certain benefit to me if I loaned them money.

Yes. It was a family member.

The presentation was impressive. They had put some thought into it. I especially liked where they Photoshopped® me sitting on a throne in a Roman palace. I loaned them the money.

If you want to really understand the character of someone close to you, loan them money. If you do this, be prepared for them to hate you for doing every single thing they asked. Why? Because it obligates them into the future for, potentially, years. Present them loves you, but future them will hate you.

Word choice can make a blog post much gooder.

Let me be clear: the closer you are to them, the more likely they are to completely break their word to you.

Why? Because borrowing money is emotional, first there’s an elation, you got the loan. Then every payment is a little bit of dread deep into their soul. They may really think they will be good at paying you. They certainly have the best of intentions.

But then . . . the rationalization hamster on the hamster wheel in their head starts running on the wheel. “John Wilder loves me. He won’t call the collateral if I miss this payment.”

The wheel moves faster. “John Wilder is doing fine. He doesn’t need this money.”

The wheel moves faster yet. “John Wilder? He sucks. What a leach. Why does everything good happen to him?”

There is one big benefit to loaning that money. If you make them sign a contract? They’ll never ask for a cent again. If they do? Just point to the contract that they never fulfilled.

And that’s the key. By not honoring that contract, they know that they have a debt. They’ve broken their words to you. But that’s not the worst part. They broke their promise to themselves. To quote Heinlein again: “Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily.” People who don’t pay debts have fallen away from duty. That’s a cancer to the soul. That’s why I don’t like debt. It’s addictive, and as a borrower it’s an easy way to make yourself a victim. As a lender, it’s an easy way to make yourself a predator.

Oh, if only the great minds from the past lived today.

I was going to write about good reasons to go into debt, but could only come up with “to buy a reasonably priced house or build/expand a profitable business.” Twelve words. Not much for a post.

Then I had what I thought was a genius idea: put out a list of bad reasons to get into debt. But I then realized that, so far, I’ve written over 464,000 words on this blog. If I put out a list of bad reasons to get into debt I could easily double that word count on just the list of bad reasons to get into debt.

So, avoid debt. Also? Avoid lending.

What does it say when an entire society is addicted to debt? I’m sure that it’s okay. I’m certain that it’s different this time.

But remember what The Bard says:

This is fine.

Leftism is a Religion

“Now I see why you’ve joined this religion. It’s the same reason I campaigned for Dukakis.” – Andy Richter Controls the Universe

“Yeah,” I thought, “Why not make EVERYONE mad?”

Religion has been a central concept for humanity as far back as we can see in the historical record which starts somewhere before Zeus fought Buddha in Summer Slam -4023 B.C. I think, as a species, we’re hardwired for worship and loving bacon, which comes into conflict for some people. I could get into the likely reasons that religion is hardwired into us, but I’ll save that for another post when I want to irritate people. What’s not up for debate is that most people express this religious brain-programming as actual religious activity, me included.

Sometimes, however, religion is replaced by “civic” religion, which was more common in the World War II generation. I was at a club a few years back and watched a 95+ year old veteran sit during the opening prayer when everyone else was standing. After the prayer, the opening ceremony moved to the national anthem. The veteran struggled to his feet and stood with hand over his heart. To me it was obvious – his religion wasn’t only Christianity (he is a Christian) – his religion is also America.

But a lot of Leftists don’t express their religious views at all – they’re atheists. Instead of expressing religious belief as religion, they adopt secular tenants as items of belief. You can’t convince them that their position is wrong with facts or logic. The only thing that can change the views of a Leftist is conversion away from the Left.

For the record, I’m not anti-atheist. I have several friends who are atheist, and I’m totally okay with that. I’ve met Libertarian atheists or atheists on the Right, and they (in general) are much more relaxed than the Leftists. We’ve had great philosophical conversations, and I don’t think less of them because they’re atheist. They don’t think less of me because I’m not. It works for us because neither of us are programmed to hate each other based on beliefs. We can even discuss religion without getting even slightly angry.

And all of his pamphlets are blank.

That’s not the case when discussing Leftist dogma with a Leftist. Perhaps the most sacred canon in liberalism is abortion. When the communist Republicans took over the government in Spain before the Spanish Civil War, just about the first thing they did was to legalize abortion. As a second step, they took over the churches. During the war, leftists murdered about 7,000 priests, monks, and nuns. It seems like every leftist takeover of a country ends up in a death-spiral against a growing number of “enemies of the revolution” that must be dealt with, especially people with a competing religion.

Lenin cat does not like competition.

Leftist dogma hates competition from priests, but they really, really like abortion. It seems that a large number of the “sins” of leftism are based in self-hatred, and the self-genocide of abortion fits nicely. I have started quite a few arguments on Twitter® on abortion, not because I think I’ll change anyone’s mind. Nope. I do it because it’s like throwing bait into piranha-infested waters – fun to watch unless you stick your hand in after the feeding frenzy has started. An example of how triggering abortion is: one Leftist politician recently attempted to (I kid you not) dox some kids who were doing the most awful thing possible outside of an abortion clinic: praying.

Leftists feel guilty, and not kind of guilt that’s potentially healthy: guilt over actions that they were responsible for that changes their future behavior for the better. No. They feel guilty over things other people do. Which people? Doesn’t matter, as long as it’s not them. They feel guilty for the actions of their ancestors. They feel guilty for the actions of their parents. They feel guilty for the actions of the Swiss. Just as long as they, personally, don’t have to take the guilt.

So, as Christianity has sin where you have to take accountability for your actions and repent, Leftism has sin where the evil must pay. Sadly, the only icon for Leftists seems to be themselves – if you’ve seen some of the selfies on Twitter®, you know what I mean. Obama® was a pretty good icon for a time, but he’s no Joe Biden.

I have a suggestion for a liberal symbol: Thanos®.

I asked The Boy to put together a mashup of George Soros and Thanos®. He did a pretty good job. I guess we could call this guy George Thoros?

Thanos© is the super-villain from the latest Marvel© comic book movies. In the previous movie, 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War™, Thanos© assembled the blingy-ist glove in history, containing multiple stones that allowed him to change reality just by snapping his fingers. What did Thanos® wish for?

His wish was that the entire population of the Universe would be cut immediately by 50%. In the movie, in rather dramatic fashion, those who were eliminated just turned to dust. Poof. Gone.

Why? This seems like an odd wish. My wish would involve many more cheeseburgers. Actually, cheeseburgers (or the lack thereof) were the basis of his wish. As a wee super-villain, Thanos© had been hungry due to overpopulation, so he decided that the best way for no one to go hungry again was to kill half of everyone. Rather than use his magic glove to give everyone free cheeseburgers for life, Thanos™ decided that more killin’ was in order, and I guess that it makes sense from a dramatic standpoint. A Spiderman® that got fat and had heart issues from all the free cheeseburgers is just pathetic. A dead Spiderman™ who evaporates into ash is good drama.

The most ironic part of the wish? It only took Earth from 1960 to 1999 to double in population from 3 billion humans to 6 billion people. Thanos© ends up killing billions of people having forgotten the fundamental principle: people can make lots more people, and we won’t forget the recipe because we practice it so much.

Interestingly (to me, at the time) Thanos® didn’t pick who lived or died. It was entirely random. So, Thanos® put together a perfect Leftist Program:

Created immediate suffering.
“Solved” a problem in the worst possible way – lots of instant pain for no real long term benefit.
Made sure that he was totally equalitarian – don’t start with prisons or jails. Just make it random.

I even read a column from a Leftist who thought that maybe Thanos© was onto the right idea. “Imagine how easily we could control Global Warming™ if only we got rid of half the people on the planet.” And abortion? Thanos© has to be a big proponent.

So, the Leftists can have their religion, it comes with its own god, death, who we can represent with Thanos©. Heck, the Left even has its own devil, Trump. Though if I were casting him in a superhero role? Yeah. Trumppool©.

The Boy put this together, too. He seemed pretty pleased.

Bad Self Help Ideas, A Naked Cat Fight, and Johnny Depp (In His Own Gravy)

“If you eliminate the third, fifth, and sixth letters, then it’s Red’s Digest, comrade.” – M*A*S*H

Yes, Laura Ingalls Wilder is where I got my blogging name. Long story.

My parents subscribed to Reader’s Digest© as I was growing up. For those unfamiliar with the magazine, it was a little bigger than a paperback book, and contained shortened versions of articles from other magazines.

TL;DR? Reader’s Digest™ is like Reddit® for old people.

Sometimes it really is aliens.

Reader’s Digest™ also contains several pages of stories from readers, mainly jokes and humorous stories, or at least it did back the last time I read it, when I was just a kid, say 10 or so. One of the stories has stuck with me since then. It goes something like this:

One day a mother looked out the kitchen window and saw her children playing in the backyard. She noticed that her son, about age seven, had a rock in his hand and was using it to strike the top of a soup can. The can was being held in place by the woman’s five-year-old daughter. What alarmed the woman was that the daughter was holding the can on top of her head.

“Timmy, stop hitting your sister!” yelled the mother.

The daughter replied, “It’s okay, Mommy, he’s almost done.”

Some of the details of the story might be wrong, but I remember the last line exactly. It amuses me to this day, because I can see that, while uncomfortable as it may be to have a seven year old whacking at a soup can on top of your head with a rock, you can be certain you will feel better when they stop.

I listen to YouTube® on the drive to work. Listen. I used to watch it, but the pedestrians didn’t seem to like sharing the sidewalk, and Pop Wilder told me when I was first learning to drive to never swerve, it was dangerous. I guess I’ll miss Grandma. Pity about the will. Anyway, the terms of my parole don’t let me watch YouTube® anymore. We have strict judges in Modern Mayberry.

YouTube™ has autoplay, and since I’m driving, I wasn’t watching, and it’s played everything from videos on Stalin to videos on chainsaws to Alice Cooper® songs that he performed for a Philippino werewolf movie. So this particular random video didn’t surprise me. In the video, I heard a person talking about how they made their life better through “Negative Visualization.”

Stalin’s program was so effective, he made 20 million people disappear! Just like food, this offer is not available in stores.

My first thought was that I had never heard that term and I was wondering if it was some sort of self-help video hosted by Stalin. Once you get into the Stalin self-help videos, that’s a never ending video sink-hole. Better Mental Health Through Collective Farming And Not Eating All That Decadent Food Like the Capitalists still gives me the shivers.

It turns out this video was entirely unrelated to Stalin, entirely bypassing the U.S.S.R. self-help craze currently so popular in California. In this particular video, the presenter suggested you imagine that something horrible happened to your family, say, they were killed slowly in a fire, or were forced to go to a Cher™ concert. He suggested that then you’d feel better when you realized that none of those horrible things happened to them. His theory is that you’d love them more and appreciate them more after mentally throwing yourself through a daily tragedy. What could go wrong?

Timmy, in other words, would stop banging the soup can on your head with a rock and you’d feel better.

I feel that Negative Visualization is a supremely stupid idea, at least for me. I thought that if I started my day imagining tragedy in all aspects of my life, that my relationships fractured, that I became ill, that I became bankrupt, or that I had to give Johnny Depp a two hour sponge bath with tepid water, I would just be depressed. So I tried it. And I was right. It was just depressing. Instead of feeling better because my bathroom was Depp-free, the emotions of imagining a nude and smelly Johnny Depp in my bathtub was just gross, so I felt both depressed and unclean.

Is it just me, or do you think that this room smells like Dinty Moore Beef Stew®, expensive foreign alcohol made from bugs, and despair? As a note, The Mrs. felt the caption should have used gravy instead of sauce. Which do you prefer, Depp Gravy™ or Depp Sauce©?

Instead of Stalin’s Daily Devotion® I decided to go back to what I’ve done for most of my life: just be grateful for what I have. Today, in this moment I have it pretty good. I have enough money to not worry for the next ten minutes. I have a loving family that will pretend to be happy to see me when I get home tonight. I have friends that I can call up and share the innermost details of my life with, so they can make fun of me behind my back. And I’m healthy, losing weight consistently, and don’t have an immediate departure date from planet Earth. Plus? I just bought a bitchin’ 6.5 Creedmoor that I need to sight in.

My life is good. Because you have a computer and you’re reading this, you have it good, too. In fact, chances are pretty strong that you’re part of the dreaded 1%.

Don’t think so? Don’t argue with Wilder.

I got into a Twitter® slapfight about just this subject. The thing I have since discovered is that winning an argument on Twitter© carries the same prestige as beating a kitten in a knife fight, so I have (mostly) given it up, which is nice for the kitten. The kitten was getting pretty tired of it, even though it had it coming. Sir Flappy Knobkins knows why.

Cats may be quick, but I have a secret weapon: I’ve mastered Laser-Fu.

But in this particular Twitter© slapfight, a gentleman from England was complaining about “the evil 1%”. My response to him was, “dude, you ARE the 1%.” He then preceded to deny that he was part of the 1%, because they were evil and owned private islands. I then pointed out the minimum income to crack the top 1%:

$32,400 per year.

Yup. If you make $32,400 a year, you’re in the top 1%. But that’s looking at the whole world. I could tell by the pause that the gentleman I was arguing with looked it up. Then he responded, “Well, not that 1%. I meant the really rich people.” His entire persona was built around the idea that he was oppressed and his Tweets® were filled with envy. I bet he’s fun at parties.

So my suggestion is this: get up every morning and don’t imagine those you love being slowly, lovingly, caressed by Joe Biden. No. Get up and be grateful. I know for a fact that many of you reading this blog are multi-thousandaires, so you have a lot to be grateful for. Gratitude feels better than envy or being depressed any day. And if something really is wrong? Remember it will pass. Eventually life gets tired, and stops hitting the can on your head with a rock.

Don’t pick a rock that’s too big.

Think how good you’ll feel when he stops!